The spectacle has the same combination of massive denial of the obvious, forced enthusiastic comradeship, and a love of show trials where, under extremely pressurized conditions, comrades are made to affirm their love of the – as it were – party.

University revenue athletics even has a Palace of Culture, complete with a cafeteria whose wall is emblazoned with the slogan EAT YOUR ENEMIES, and whose every surface has the hammer and swooshle.

At today’s scandal-plagued darling, the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, a recent show for the trustees featured revenue athletes there getting up and pledging their troth to the People’s Committee for the Real Actual and True Education of Football and Basketball Players.

But the athletes’ testimony had an effect opposite to its intent. When [one of them] feels compelled to say of himself and his teammates, “Trust me, we all can read and write,” the heart sinks.

And the discouragement deepens with the realization that UNC can’t get beyond denial. The show for the trustees – called “A Day in the Life of a Student-Athlete” – came the same week that national audiences watching shows on ESPN and HBO heard from former UNC athletes with a different message. They said that not only were they steered to no-show classes, but their entire schedules and majors were set up for them to maximize the time they could devote to sports and still stay academically eligible.

…or call it a philosophy…

As university students abandon football, coaches and presidents have at the very least a rhetorical problem. They will never of course drop football, because they can always make a profit sending their players out to play one massively losing game after another for the money. On the other hand, the fact that, for instance, at Central Michigan University, “[o]nly 102 students attended the last home game against Eastern Michigan,” does sort of need to be dealt with. The stadium’s capacity is 30,199. That was a home game.

So, you know, some new philosophy, some new rhetoric, some new position-taking is going to have to happen in response to – uh – queries about this situation. Here’s the CMU athletic director (salary: close to $300,000 a year):

“Does it matter if you have no one at your game, or 15,000, or 110,000?” Heeke asked. “Does that somehow deem [sic] that you shouldn’t play football at this school because you can’t reach 15,000? [Like a lot of schools, CMU fudges like mad to pretend to the NCAA that it meets the minimal attendance standard.] If the school makes the decision to play football, why should it matter? It’s their decision how they want to manage the game and what they think their expectation is and what makes it a viable program.”

See, to UD, this is where things start to get interesting on the American university campus. This is where there’s suddenly an intellectually generative convergence between things like philosophy and literature – as in those famous lines at the end of Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man” –

… the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

– and the sports program. These are difficult, paradoxical lines, easily seen, now, as expressing what you see when you look at the nothing that is Kelly/Shorts stadium.

What does it matter, asks the AD, if there is nothing?

If a quarterback falls in Kelly/Shorts, does it make any sound?

Discuss.

The University of North Carolina research paper heard ’round the world has hit England, and some BBC snob has the gall to tell us that we can’t sustain our university football model.

The notion that participants in major college sports are still “scholar-athletes” becomes more and more difficult to defend with each new revelation from schools like UNC.

Add in the mounting scientific evidence that high-contact sports like US football can cause long-term brain damage, and it seems increasingly likely that intercollegiate athletics, as it is now structured, is an unsustainable proposition.

Oh really? Really? You don’t think the United States can sustain an entire nation of universities full of absolutely bogus students and a corrupt faculty to go with them?

Just watch us.

Christine Brennan’s familiar, unconscionable bullshit about university football players getting a college education fares poorly at the hands of Joe Nocera during a radio discussion of unionization of players.

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Brennan: “The academic pursuits [of university football players] are being met in a beautiful way. … [And] union dues? Who’s paying for all this?”

Nocera:  “Hahaha.  I really respect Christine a lot, but I just disagree with almost everything she just said… When you have coaches making five million dollars a year,  it’s silly to say that there’s no money to pay players. [As for education,]  the only thing you major in is eligibility… The courses are baloney… [Many revenue athletes] absolutely positively couldn’t make it in a university setting.”

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UD thanks Dirk.

James Schuyler’s great, endless poem, “Hymn to Life,” is all about April, the way the world’s sudden sharp-edged surging back to life stirs us – but stirs us, says Schuyler, to this:

Life, I do not understand.

Stirred, shaken, clueless in the surge. But the poet in “Hymn to Life” endlessly registers – sings – the way the world looks, the surge of bliss inside him, the suffering that shadows it. Here is an excerpt.

Press your face into the
Wet April chill: a life mask. Attune yourself to what is happening
Now, the little wet things, like washing up the lunch dishes. Bubbles
Rise, rinse and it is done. Let the dishes air dry, the way
You let your hair after a shampoo. All evaporates, water, time, the
Happy moment and — harder to believe — the unhappy. Time on a bus,
That passes, and the night with its burthen and gift of dreams. That
Other life we live and need, filled with joys and terrors, threaded
By dailiness: where the wished for sometimes happens, or, just
Before waking tremulous hands undo buttons. Another day, the sun
Comes out from behind unbuttoned cloud underclothes — gray with use —
And bud scales litter the sidewalks.

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The poem speaks in the whispered self-prompting of the lyric; this is a consciousness urging itself toward clarity, regretting but forgiving its lack of clarity. Hyper-clarified April days bring on a sense of inner/outer paradox: the mind doesn’t understand the world that seems to press an obvious immediacy of understanding of the real right into the poet’s face. Any idiot could see the world and life for what they are! And so he urges himself on to take it, to press his face into not the death mask but the life mask that forms around his face as he braves the April chill. How can you be so dense and shadowed when it’s all over you, smack in your face, the life-blast? April is the ultimate come-on, and God forbid you’re like Eliot’s wasted man, calling it cruel because it fucks with some weird little ontological ice age you’ve got going. Be in tune with the living world and let things be without troubling them with your efforts to understand what life is. And don’t even try to understand your crazy dreams from “that other life” where you’ll wake up, dammit, just as “tremulous hands undo buttons.” So maybe your dreams won’t recompense you; but the clouds unbutton, leaving a world so lit up you can see “bud scales” all over the sidewalk. Not buds; the particular tiny scaly leaves that cling to the buds, protecting them as they slowly flower. That’s how precise the light lets your vision be; and that’s how intricate and intense the world’s effort is to nurture and replicate itself into full bloom.

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The trees leaf out and bloom. You
Suddenly sense: you don’t know what. An exhilaration that revives
Old views and surges of energy or the pure pleasure of
Simply looking…

But these burgeoning days are
Not like any others. Promise is a part of it, promise of warmth
And vegetative growth. “Wheel me out into the sun, Sonny,
These old bones that creak need it.” And the gardener does not
Come back: over the winter he had a heart attack, has to take it
Easy. You see death shadowed out in another’s life. The threat
Is always there, even in balmy April sunshine. So what
If it is hard to believe in? Stopping in the city while the light
Is red, to think that all who stop with you too must stop, and
Yet it is not less individual a fate for all that. “When I
was born, death kissed me. I kissed it back.” Meantime, there
Is bridge, and solitaire, and phone calls and a door slams, someone
Goes out into the April sun to take a spin as far as the
Grocer’s, to shop, and then come back. In the fullness of time,
Let me hand you an empty cup, coffee stained. Or a small glass
Of spirits: “Here’s your ounce of whisky for today.”

… Life, I do not understand.

One of the several sleazy self-dealings available to med school professors at universities as reputable as Tufts is flacking the drugs you’re researching.

But UD! you say. How – put aside the greed part of it – can the research results of someone not only flacking the product she’s researching, but receiving personal compensation from the company pushing the product – be ethical? How can the results of her experimentation be taken seriously by anyone? Doesn’t Tufts have standards?

No. Plenty of other schools do, but Tufts doesn’t.

When it comes to infamy, Tufts University is a well-established pro.

Johnny Manziel, and now his replacement at Texas A&M: Really not too bad. Not too bad at all!

To persecute [Kenny] Hill for doing something that Texas A&M students, and college students across the nation, engage in routinely is a crime in itself. If you haven’t seen the Arizona and Wisconsin University riots from this weekend, I suggest you Google them immediately.

“Thinking seriously endangers those who do it… They may, unexpectedly, learn something truly important, and they will be compelled to live with it. Liberal education does not make for comfort; it does not promote success in public life; it may not even make one happy.”

Allan Spitz, University of Alabama Huntsville, who died last January at 83.

Riots last night at the University of Arizona in Tucson were totally expected, totally prepared for. Win or lose a game, drunk students hit the bars and then hit the streets.

Scroll down for their selfies of police trying to protect property from them.

UA already has Rick Rodriguez and football players who punch women full in the face. Riots are icing on the cake for this … uh… [trails off, unable to find a word for it]…

That’s a nice gentlemanly way to put it. A member of America’s most homicidal university fraternity (its body count puts even FAMU’s Merry Manslaughterers to shame) fails, in his comment in this post’s headline, to register the difference between bad things happening to you (adversity) and bad people killing you (murder, manslaughter, via hazing). Maybe this …. I dunno… call it moral aphasia… accounts for the fact that despite the truckload of bodies Sigma Alpha Epsilon has racked up, its members continue to perceive it as a fashioner of gentlemen… They’re constantly using the word gentlemen in talking about the place…

UD‘s take on this is what you’d expect. She understands that men in certain sorts of groups will always want to torture and kill each other. She fails to see why this activity should take place at universities, on campus or off. Attaching the word “gentlemen” to this activity has a nice rough irony to it, and UD is alive to this fun use of language. But it doesn’t really take you very far, again, in the direction of universities.

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Now, as universities become desperate about declining enrollments and that big ol’ loan to pay back on the new stadium, they will certainly be tempted, like the University of Massachusetts Amherst, to specialize in admitting all the violent gentlemen no other university wants. Big ol’ gangs of them, year after year, to bond and riot and haze. Like Zoo Mass (update on its AMAZING football team, football conference, game attendance, and stadium choices, here), these schools will get a reputation, and all the gentlemen in the vicinity will make a point of attending them.

In the not too distant future, Richie Incognito will be the president of a university.

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But back to Sigma whatever. Talk about adversity. Even a bank as astoundingly scummy as Jamie Dimon’s JPMorgan Chase finds this frat too scummy to do business with.

Early this month, JPMorgan Chase stopped managing an investment account for a prominent client: the charitable foundation of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, one of the nation’s largest fraternities.

The bank was concerned about SAE’s bad publicity, according to Anthony Alberico, a JPMorgan vice president who dealt with the foundation. SAE has had 10 deaths linked to drinking, drugs and hazing since 2006, more than any other fraternity.

“If JPMorgan is going to turn us down, who’s next?” said Bradley Cohen, SAE’s national president. “What if universities start saying SAE’s not welcome?”

Well. There’s always Goldman Sachs.

Nah! And good to hear it’s just an opening bid. I’m thinking $80 million is more appropriate. This is America, dammit, and the University of Virginia isn’t exactly a shabby college in the woods somewhere. Compensatory damages in Charlottesville are going to look a lot different from damages in … well, in places where for some it may seem like a lot.

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No. $800 million. The UVa student who has brought the suit

had just emerged from a grocery store near the University of Virginia when several [Alcoholic Beverage Control] agents emerged from a darkened parking lot and swarmed her car with their guns drawn. One jumped on her car’s hood.

They mistakenly thought she’d bought alcohol at the store. The student understandably panicked and a nasty chase ensued. She also spent a night in jail.

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NOOOO. The more I think about this, the more I think $1600 million would begin to address the trauma this woman has undergone.

And again if UD could address herself to some for whom it may seem like a lot – you need to understand the context.

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Finally, to take this out of Snark: This seems an obvious case of excessive force, and some compensation is warranted. It’s disgusting that it happened. It’s disgusting that this woman is demanding this amount of money because it happened.

Nadal has turned down the University of the Balearic Islands doctorate because of the murky controversy to which its angry president alludes.

What possible basis could there be for a faculty and student body hesitating to award an honorary doctorate to a 27 year old who “left conventional schooling after he turned pro at 15″, and who is famous for “his habit of biting the trophies” he wins?

Mark Cuban has thrown quite a missile into the stupidhappy world of American football. He predicts the greedy NFL, which seems to be moving toward 24/7 televised football games (and what a noble physical spectacle football is; one player, anticipating yet another weekday game being added, says that for him it would be like “getting in a car wreck Sunday then getting hit by a train Thursday.”), will implode in ten years via saturation bombing.

And what (ahem!) are the implications of this possibility for American universities – many of whom are already largely given over, financially and academically, to the game? I mean, in all the responses to Cuban’s argument, no one mentions that it’s not only national saturation via professional football. Most of the people staring at NFL games are also staring at university games… SO much football, my fellow Americans…

Before UD offers an analysis of the higher ed implications of Cuban’s thing, she reminds you that attendance at university games (as well as professional) is down across the country and will probably decline more over the next few years. Even the state god of Alabama has warned the little people they’d better start showing up at games (and staying at games – these university things are televised too, and it looks pathetic when after the first half the stands are empty) or else. Add to this picture continuing huge expenditures for bigger stadiums (Take the University of New Hampshire for a sample of the sort of thinking university administrators are doing on this issue. Its spokesperson explains that “it attracts about 750 students to [its current stadium], which seats about 6,500 but would grow to 10,000 under the new plan. UNH said a new stadium would attract more students to games and to the university as a whole.”), continued high-profile team criminality (Cuban talks about this as a factor in the decline of NFL too), continued reputational damage due to cheating scandals, etc.

Okay, so what should universities do at this point, if Cuban is in any way correct in his description of the future of the game?

If the NFL implodes, someone’s gonna have to be there to pick up the shards of what’s left. When American public opinion is so disgusted with the corruption and greed of professional football that people abandon it, there sits the sweet innocent university, ready to give our people the true unadulterated game again! Football played by uncompensated scholars who play for the love of the game… Who play whenever their academic schedules permit… It’s inspiring, it’s about clean-living, it’s what this country very badly needs. It’s a winner.

Taxpayers subsidize a school in Chapel Hill that embodies the athletic dreams of their great state, and it has always been the responsibility of its board of trustees (The trustee page includes nicknames for each of the trustees. Haywood Cochrane is “Haywood,” Peter Grauer is “Peter,” Kelly Hopkins is “Kelly.”) to retain faculty who understand the foundational values of the institution.

A one-paragraph final paper for a recent course at the mill – a paragraph plagiarized from the first page of a reader designed for third graders – has gone viral and why not. Why the hell not. Its grade was A minus.

People – especially the people footing the bill, which is to say the citizens of North Carolina – have every right to know why they paid for that minus, what the fuck that itty bitty tail is doing trailing that A like some pointless right offensive guard just standing there along the side of things taking up room on the field. Whenever you give a revenue athlete a grade, you’re sending one of two messages: We love you, and ever since we debased ourselves beyond belief to recruit you, our love has only grown; or We take it upon ourselves to judge you. To actually judge you and give you a minus.

Which one will it be, Tar Heels???

Vaunted:

often spoken of or described as very good or great : often praised

Uh, I guess. UD graduated from Northwestern University, but she married a Harvard graduate and … well… you know how that goes. She understands that NU’s intellectual currency and its university-market-hotness (always pretty high) has zoomed forward in the last few years, and she’s happy to hear that.

She herself, a ‘thesdan, knew little of NU’s prestige or whatever when she decided to go there. She went there because she thought she might want to be a journalist, and NU’s school of journalism was a good one. It took a semester for her to realize she didn’t want to be a journalist. After a quick chat about it with Erich Heller (“If you are unhappy doing that, why continue to do that?”), she transferred to the literature department, where she did indeed get a good education, and where she was very happy.

She went to one boring absurd football game which NU lost by (she seems to recall) sixty or so points, and gave no thought to the world of bigtime athletes and whether they were getting said vaunted education.

Years later, she got to thinking about universities as such, and this thing kept sticking in the university’s craw, as it were, this billion dollar revenue sports thing. As in the latest case — Julius Nyang’oro’s University of North Carolina — everyone knows you cannot under any circumstances reconcile the vast both-wings billion dollar media conspiracy university football has become with anything other than no college education (the player plays the game, takes no classes, goes pro after a year) or bogus college education (Nyang’oro plus the Academic Assistance Center whores keep the ball rolling).

Everyone’s excited about Northwestern’s players having made progress toward unionization, and of course it is a good thing. Few beyond the truly depraved find the NCAA millionaires and the hapless no ed/bogus ed players anything other than a repellent couple. And with a union the guys will get good medicare care after they bash their brains in. Plus they’re asking for shorter practice hours, the lazy bums.

It’s the practice hours that’s really going to piss off the NCAA, not the medical thing. The whole point is that this is professional football, not wussy college football. Take a look at the University of Oregon’s new practice center, its walls plastered with KILL THE ENEMY propaganda. You have to take the trouble to get to know this culture, I’m saying. There’s no reason it is located on university campuses. It is in fact wholly at odds with universities (drunken tribes cheering on violent bulk smashing up against violent bulk – not exactly the life of the mind, kiddies). Recall life at Nebraska and Oregon when Mr Football, Richie Incognito, studied at those schools. As long as sports factories who don’t give a flying fuck about educating the bulk keep the practice hours long, other schools aren’t going to shorten them.

What I’m trying to say is that, union or not, you can’t make it work. University football is always going to be the same. It’s always going to be disgusting and it’s always going to destroy universities. It makes too many icky people too rich.

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This, by the way, on our rapidly onlining colleges and universities, is what’s left (what may soon be left) of face-to-face, in person experience on campus. Hulk v. Hulk.